[TUHS] History of cal(1)?

[John Cowan via TUHS]

That's almost why Harvard settled with Trump.

On Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 6:15 PM Warner Losh via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 12:21 PM Theodore Ts'o via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 12:53:21PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> > > But the difference is that CMU's lawyers made any student who had AT&T
> > code
> > > sign an NDA  (even for the OS course).   They wanted to ensure we
> > > understand the source code we were using for the class had a copyright
> > and
> > > that we would not share that >>source<< with anyone.  But when we
> signed
> > > that document, the CMU lawyers stated explicitly to us (and also
> > supposedly
> > > had reminded AT&T's lawyers) that under PA law, there were two items:
> > >
> > >    1. anything we >>learned<< was ours to keep, and
> > >    2. the AT&T license could not restrict someone from working at
> Place X
> > >    because once they saw Place Y's IP.
> > >
> > > I believe California has the same law. I do know that in Massachusetts,
> > > from being personally involved when Tom Teixeria and I left Masscomp
> for
> > > Stellar, Masscomp could not stop us (which, at the time, Gus Klein, who
> > had
> > > recently been named President of Masscomp, tried to sue. These two
> points
> > > held firm — Gus eventually backed off).
> >
> > I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect IP law wasn't as settled back then.
> > Remember, this was before courts ruled that Lotus couldn't copyright
> > their user interface.  And even if the law was "clear", the way the US
> > court system works is that the party with the larger legal budget can
> > often intimidate people who might not be able to afford the best
> > justice money can buy.
> >
>
> It's worse than that. The US joined the Berne Convention in 1980, which
> threw a lot of monkey wrenches into things. The 1980 Copyright act changed
> a lot of things. Prior to that, you could not copyright software *AT*ALL*.
> This is why Unix was done via Trade Secret: they couldn't copyright the
> software.
>
>
> > This is what I've learned by hanging around lawyers who disagreed
> > about whether it was "safe" to ship CDDL-licened ZFS code ported to
> > GPL-licensed Linux kernel.  It's not just about law, but how litigious
> > the copyright owner might be, and if the defendant is a small company,
> > such a lawsuit might be seen as "punching down", but if the defendant
> > was a large company, it might have very different PR angle, and PR is
> > often at least as important whether the company prevails in a court of
> > law (if defendant doesn't go out of business first).
> >
>
> This is true... It's all about risk. How much risk are you willing to take
> with an action? There's never 0 risk. And the answer often depends on the
> specifics.
>
>
> > Even if you will eventually win, there's a reason why many people will
> > settle patent lawsuits because even if you are sure that you are in
> > the right, it might be cheaper to pay the Danegeld than to eventually
> > prevail after multiple years of litigation.
> >
> > So I wouldn't be surprised that different legal teams coming from
> > different universities might have come out in different places
> > (especially if they thought they could use their Alumni mafia back
> > channel to eventually side step the whole issue.  :-)
> >
>
> Yea. It's all about risk. How much risk is there? Do we care? How do we
> mitigate it? There's times you "play nice" even if you think the other side
> has no case because long-game strategies (like the Alumni mafia) are easier
> to get things resolved than an instant head-on collision.
>
> Warner
>